Tag: BMI

I wasn’t sure what to write about today, so I thought I’d go with a popular topic in my grab bag – weight loss. It’s something I struggle with every day, and likely will until I reach my goal (which is a healthy BMI, generally).

I think I got to my lowest and visually best weight three years ago, when I got down to the 240’s for a friend’s wedding. Actually, looking at my old spreadsheets, it looks like I was in the 230’s (at least according to whatever scale I was using) in 2015.

But now I’m in the 260’s, hovering in that range for quite a while. That’s not to say I haven’t made progress though! I ballooned up to the 270’s and in the past year and a half made good progress to come back down to where I am now. The thing is, it’s slow progress, and I’m not seeing the results I’d like (I can tell that two years ago, I was a lot thinner looking in the face, for example).

And I’ve tried several things. Most recently I tried looking at my calorie count weekly. Since MyFitnessPal makes this somewhat difficult, I made myself crazy trying to get Tasker & FitBit to give me daily notifications; once I got it working it was great. But I found that I wasn’t really paying much notice to it.

So I took a break; I’m back at tracking my calories now. I saw a post on reddit.com/r/loseit that suggested a hybrid of calorie tracking – use a higher daily limit on the weekends than the weekdays. Essentially it’s the same as tracking weekly, but I know that I only have so many calories to use during the week. I haven’t been 100% successful in implementing this yet, mostly because I haven’t figured out how many calories I want to restrict myself to on weekdays.

But the other thing that I thought of on my own was to use MFP’s great “Quick Add Calories” tool to my advantage. I figure that I should be tracking daily – it’s the best way to keep myself accountable. And I recognize that sometimes, I do go over my goal, and that’s OK. What I need to do in order to counter this is to make sure I don’t keep going over my goal every day.

To that end, I’m trying something new this week: adding the calories I overeat back to my log the next day as a “Quick Add” entry. So Tuesday I went over by 72 calories, and I added it to m Wednesday totals. Wednesday, I went over by 392 (320 + 72). Oops. OK, so I’ll add 392 to today (Thursday). My goal today is 1568, effectively.

I’m also trying not to eat back exercise calories. I’m hoping that this works to my advantage, because it also means despite going over my calorie goals, I technically still had room left to eat more. We’ll see how it works! I hope I’m explaining myself clearly enough too, by the way.

So far, so good though – I started the week at 265.9, and weighed in this morning at 263.7! I’m doing a daily weigh-in and taking the weekly average though, because weight can fluctuate so much. Still, I take this as a success.